Data centers of remote network computing providers may house significant numbers of interconnected computing systems to provide computing resources to customers. Such data centers may provide network access, power, hardware resources (e.g., computing and storage), and secure installation facilities for hardware maintained by the data center, an organization, or by another third party.
To facilitate increased utilization of data center resources, virtualization technologies may allow a single physical computing machine to host one or more instances of virtual machines that appear and operate as independent computer machines to a connected computer user. With virtualization, the single physical computing device can create, maintain or delete virtual machines in a dynamic manner. In turn, users can request computer resources from a data center and be provided with varying numbers of virtual machine resources on an “as needed” basis or at least on an “as requested” basis.
The remote network computing providers providing virtual machine resources to their users generally strive to provide such resources with optimum levels of availability, scalability and reliability.